DURING the Olympic Games in Sydney last year, Japan went crazy in the
going-for-gold stakes. The country鈥檚 sports authority went so far as to set an
unofficial target of eight gold medals for its athletes to meet. Understandable
up to a point: despite the Olympian ideal, these are still games, and the point
is to win.
Unfortunately, the same attitude now seems to be pervading scientific
research. Nobel prizes have become so important to Japanese prestige that the
government plans deliberately to collect them. It has set a target of 30 over
the next 50 years as against the 6 that Japan has notched up in the previous
50.
True, Japan has a lot of catching up to do. In most other industrialised
countries, basic research is still considered an admirable end in itself, with a
Nobel prize a bonus rather than the goal. Japan, on the other hand, is good at
producing scientists who can make robots dance the merengue but less good at
producing the kind of research that catches the eye of the Royal Swedish Academy
of Sciences.
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Take the case of the latest prizewinner, Hideki Shirakawa. He was jointly
awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in October, for his work on plastic
semiconductors. Before that, few people in Japan had ever heard of him. Recently
retired from Tsukuba University, Shirakawa had received a flood of offers to
take up research posts overseas, but not one from a Japanese research
institution.
So when the Nobel award was announced, panic spread through newspaper offices
across Japan. The government was also taken by surprise, and a few days later
hurriedly awarded Shirakawa the Order of Culture, Japan鈥檚 highest civilian
decoration. Equally belatedly, offers of research posts came pouring in from
Japanese institutions.
鈥淐ynics say. . .this was a classic example of how Japan relies on outsiders
to evaluate its own talents,鈥� lamented science journalist Fumitaka Shibata in
the newspaper Yomiuri.
If Shirakawa鈥檚 Nobel award had come in 2001 instead of 2000, the situation
might have been even more embarrassing. By then he would have been working
abroad鈥攜et another brain drained from Japan鈥檚 pool of talent. At least two
of Japan鈥檚 other Nobel prizewinners had to go abroad to have their abilities
acknowledged: Leo Esaki was working for IBM in the US when he won the 1973 Nobel
Prize in Physics, and Susumu Tonegawa won the 1987 prize for physiology and
medicine for research carried out at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
Setting a target for Nobel prizes is as petty and counterproductive as the
setting of a gold medal target. In the event, Japan took home just five golds
from Sydney. True, the Nobel prize tends to mean that more money will be
allocated for basic research. But to use that money effectively the government
would have to understand what basic research is all about鈥攁 desire to
unravel the mysteries of the Universe鈥攁nd support the people who have that
vision.
If that leads to more Nobel prizes, great. If not, does it really matter?